Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to the field of aircraft cabin design and, in particular, to providing a modular system for customizing an interior of an aircraft cabin. More particularly, the present invention is directed to a system and method of combining modular components having an indexing feature to properly align external windows of an aircraft fuselage with aircraft cabin wall panels containing window openings and window shades.
Discussion of Related Art
Passenger airplanes include a plurality of windows extending through the fuselage to allow for the entry of light into the airplane and allow passengers to see outside the airplane. These so-called external windows are spaced apart from each other by a fixed window pitch. “Window pitch” is defined as the separation between a middle point of one window to the middle point of an adjacent window. For an interior cabin of an aircraft, panels containing a window opening and a window shade which controls the amount of light entering the cabin through the opening, namely, so-called internal windows, are aligned with each external window. Thus, in commercial aircraft the window pitch of the external windows and the window pitch of the internal windows are constant and align with each other throughout the aircraft. Alternatively, the alignment occurs throughout different sections of an aircraft. For example, a business class section of a cabin may have a first window pitch to accommodate a wider seat separation between adjacent seat rows, whereas a coach class section will have a second window pitch smaller than the first window pitch due to a narrower row separation. In private aircraft, however, the interior cabins are not fixed but can be customized based on interior design specifications. Thus, for example, a bedroom of a private aircraft may have one or two internal windows aligned with external windows, followed, or separated, by a blank wall panel void of an internal window cutout or opening, whereas a conference room may have several internal windows aligned with external windows and equally spaced from each other.
In addition, in some circumstances an aircraft fuselage may be lengthened by inserting a fuselage extender panel such that the window pitch of the external windows is no longer constant between the windows directly adjacent either side of the extender panel. In such cases, an interior cabin spacer panel will be inserted to align the interior windows of the cabin with the exterior windows of the fuselage. The interior panels, therefore, regardless of whether they contain a window cutout or “cone”, or a blank panel “extender”, are designed to accommodate the fixed spacing of an aircraft to align the internal windows with the external fuselage windows of the aircraft.
Under current aircraft interior design techniques, each custom cabin panel—regardless of whether the panel contains an internal window cutout—is molded separately so as to align the internal cabin walls with the fuselage windows. Thus, a mold is constructed to form a panel having a particular width dimension and, thereafter, that mold would most likely not be used again. This causes significant waste in materials, time and cost. Moreover, the width dimension of the panels must be substantially exact to take into account the fixed space constraints of an aircraft cabin and provide for window alignment between internal and external aircraft windows.